With this achievement, the “Center for Education and Research on Advanced Fire Safety Science and Technology in East Asia” was adopted by the FY 2007 Global COE Program (FY 2007 to 2011). Safety and security are pivotal to social development, and TUS has, as the core of the fire safety engineering field both domestically and internationally, contributed to their advancement. In recent years, cities in East Asia in particular have been undergoing marked transformation at a speed that no another Asian country including Japan has ever experienced, and yet alongside this process of urbanization the fire risk also grows. Large-scale fires and explosions involving petrochemical materials have frequently occurred in urban structures, causing catastrophic death and damage. In the educational research field associated with fire safety engineering, TUS has a duty to respond to this urgent situation sufficiently and, at the same time, predict the characteristics of future fire accidents and further develop the innovative educational research system in efforts to prevent the occurrence of such fire accidents. In utilizing the advanced outcomes obtained from the activities of the 21st Century COE Program, this program is designed to achieve the following goals:

• Develop and diffuse effective educational study in order to reduce fire risk

• Promote collaborative research in efforts to foster human resources through developing theory and conducting large-scale fire tests in laboratory settings

• Establish a graduate course for fire science

• Further promote the use of the unique, university-level large-scale fire research and test laboratory in Japan

The outcomes expected from this program will greatly contribute to fire safety not only here in Japan but also internationally, particularly in East Asia.